


Miles to Go

by Moonrose91



Series: Gift Verse [3]
Category: Marvel (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Discovery, Family Bonding, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-01
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 06:25:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/475503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moonrose91/pseuds/Moonrose91
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint just can’t shake the feeling that not all is rosy with the world, but he’s not sure if that is just him or if it is really something different.</p><p>(Imported from my LiveJournal with some minor editing done)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miles to Go

Clint is had told Natasha, naturally, the minute he was allowed to. Which was after Phil had accepted that this was really happening and Clint had rushed to tell her, tripping over words in his excitement.

“You are mad,” she had responded and Clint had just laughed.

Now, months later and a frightening c-section later, he’s holding his baby girl. She has fine baby fuzz over her hair, with all ten fingers and all ten toes. She is the perfect little angel…and Clint feels like something is off. However, Phil is tired (and in agony) and Clint focuses on the pair of them together before taking the first picture of many.

As the weeks pass, with them settling into their roles as parents, Clint is more than happy to record every single minute of every single waking moment (and napping moment) of Elizabeth. They have to buy a new album for all the pictures before she’s three weeks old, and they talk about the fact that they have to bottle feed. Phil is talking about teaching Elizabeth baby sign language to help her communicate her needs before she can tell them and Clint gets overly excited. He loves learning sign language and quickly signs the word for ‘bottle’ and ‘please’ every time he feeds her.

It was falling in love with Phil all over again as the man’s love of schedules fills up.

They have to buy a new bookshelf when Elizabeth is a month old to fit all of the photo albums Clint has filled up with pictures of their baby girl.

* * *

She’s rolling over by two months, something that has Clint giggling excitedly and showing Natasha over and over and over and  _over_  again the film of Elizabeth turning over with an excited babble, to the point where she has to resist the urge to strangle him.

She understands that he loves his daughter more than life itself, loves his baby girl as much as he loves Phil (if, obviously, in a different way), but that doesn’t mean that she’s as excited as him. Children were never part of her future view, but the way Clint babbles over Elizabeth and coos over every little thing, it is obvious that it was always something Clint dreamed about, but never voiced.

The fact he wasn’t the one to film it is enough to make her want to strangle  _Phil_  instead, because the bastard somehow managed to get the piece of video to Clint  _in the middle of god-damned **nowhere**_.

If it weren’t for the fact that such a skill was prized, she would murder him.

She won’t however and, instead, buys Clint one of those pocket wallets that holds pictures and cards. He is a grinning mess and, somehow, manages to join the world with all the other child-free mortals and settles into work. Clint settles in, is serious and a blank mask of professionalism that seems to come from an inner willpower that springs from _now_ _here_  before he spends the rest of the trip chatting over the phone to both Phil and Elizabeth, his fingers twitching to sign as he speaks.

Natasha is slightly less irritated watching the way his face lights up.

But only slightly. She still wishes to strangle the man.

It only gets worse when, the next time they go on a mission, Clint’s wallet gets picked (the first time this happened, ever), but the minute a pickpocket’s hand gets anywhere near the wallet of pictures, Clint is a snarling tower of fury and the pickpocket is cradling a broken hand.

* * *

Elizabeth is five months old, dressed in cute pink pants and a shirt that says, ‘I love my daddy’ on it in cutsy letters.

Clint has never been happier to be home. Phil greets him and Elizabeth lets out a happy babble sound from where she is sitting up, playing with plush blocks. Clint gives Phil a kiss and pauses, giving a twitch of his head. Phil rolls his eyes and smiles, so Clint drags him over. They spend an  _hour_  playing with the blocks, stacking them up and watching her building new towers and even castles, or something that is somewhat close to the second.

She learns quickly that big blocks are better on the bottom, but enjoys knocking them over more then building and always seems surprised when  _Clint_  knocks them over and onto her before smiling and laughing.

Clint puts that laugh up on his list of most beautiful and amazing sounds, which include Phil’s own laugh and the sound of an arrow being released from a bow and flying through the air.

“I have to go get some files from Fury. Can you watch Elizabeth?” he asked.

“Yes,” Clint answered, already plotting in how to make Phil’s favorite meal that Clint could cook; spaghetti. Could Elizabeth eat any of that?

He would have to go read The List that Phil left him. However, that didn’t matter.

Clint is having too much fun putting the dragon (who Clint is sure is ‘Na-fu’) out of Elizabeth’s reach and having her crawl towards it, because she is adorable. He lets her have it, of course, but exercise is important and he’s unsure of how else to make sure she gets it.

He turns it into a game, one she eagerly plays. He makes things disappear and reappear (by putting a blanket over them) and earning happy sounds.

Clint is beaming when she pulls the blanket he’s been using off her dragon to reveal it herself and falls over backwards with the effort.

No blood, brain matter, or bruises, so Clint doesn’t panic as much as he wants to, because she slowly rolls her way back up. She builds up blocks and Clint smiles before she begins to make her way to the kitchen. Clint follows, keeping at her eye level for the most part and is uncaring of the fact that Natasha can (and has) enter the apartment with or without hacking.

Clint watches with unparalleled delight (nothing, not even archery) compares to the moment of her signing their home sign for bottle, or trying to, and then pointing at the fridge. Clint grins brightly and is more then happy to begin the process of making her a bottle.

He and Phil decided that they wouldn’t have the bottles in their fridge for anything other then emergencies.

He pulls her ‘play blanket’ (a huge crochet thing that he and Phil both made) into the kitchen, far from the stove, and he settled her toys on it, scattering them a bit so she had to crawl to them if she wanted them. Clint grinned and then focused on finding the metal teapot to boil water in. He glanced over, grinning at how she was crawling towards a block that had rolled away, her back to him.

He focused back and pulled out the metal, whistling… _thing_ , the word escaping him at the moment.

He filled it with water, setting it on the burner so he could heat up the water. He then went over to play with his baby girl to play with her, mostly distracting her from the fact she still hadn’t gotten her bottle just yet. When the thing starts whistling, he gets up to do just that while Elizabeth knocks over the blocks.

He’s in the process of transferring it to a cold burner when he sloshes it so it makes that odd sizzle noise on accident, mostly in remembering to turn off the damn stove.

He lets out a surprised shout, not used to the sound that is too close to a snake for Clint’s comfort (too often has he had to deal with snakes threatening him because his perch happens to be a hair too close to some snake’s nest). He drops the teakettle item, having it let out a sizzle and a loud clattering.

Clint is immediately cleaning up the water, hissing lightly at the hot water and quickly dumps the kettle into the sink, before realizing that it is deathly silent, aside from the soft sound of water going down the drain.

He looks over, at his daughter and feels as if the world has shifted again.

Elizabeth is completely unaffected by everything that had just happened, still happily playing with her plush blocks, even though the clatter of the pots still rings in Clint’s own ears.

He quickly finishes mopping up all the hot water and pulls one of the two bottles they have in the fridge (the temp labels Phil put on them is enough to reassure them that they haven’t been in there for 24 hours). He smiles, but it is shaky and Elizabeth, his baby girl, reaches out and grabs his face. He smiles a bit and picks her up. He has her focus on him as he settles on the glider.

She eagerly grabs onto the bottle and, from habit and practice, Clint sings to her, even though he’s pretty sure that she can’t hear him.

When Phil walks in, it is to Clint helping Elizabeth build another tower. “Elizabeth can’t hear,” he states calmly, as if they were talking about the weather.

“I don’t want to know how you know that, but I have to ask,” Phil stated.

“I got distracted. You know how I am when I suddenly hear a hiss sound. Too many close calls to really ever have a moment to think when I hear the sound. Anyway, I was heating up water in the kettle, I remember the word now, so I could make our baby girl here a bottle. I dropped the thing and, without thinking, then tossed it into our metal sink. I am ashamed to admit that I hadn’t noticed she wasn’t crying from surprise or fear, or both, mostly because I was focused on cleaning up boiling hot water,” Clint answered and Phil sighed, muttering something about how he better have taken care of himself on that.

Clint wriggled his fingers at Phil and grinned brightly as Elizabeth tried to copy. He made a face and talked to her. Phil watched, knowing it was going to change nothing.

They would just try to keep her resting against their chest as they talked.

After all, lip-reading and talking were useful skills that Phil and Clint (and Phil is sure he missed ten minutes, at least, of Clint floundering over how to treat their daughter that was ‘suddenly’ deaf) are going to make sure she can read lips, use sign language, and  _talk_ , because Phil isn’t going to let his daughter be some helpless damsel in distress.

On top of it being impractical, Phil knows that, suddenly, life has become a thousand times harder. 90% of his attention is on his family; Clint and Elizabeth. The other 10% is running through the tests that need to be run, the speech therapists, and the finding of a school that he can focus on.

He can find the people.

He’ll need Clint to  _see_  the people though.

* * *

 

The tests are run shortly thereafter, mostly when they have the time and the doctors that are SHIELD approved are able to see them.

They aren’t the only couple with a child in SHIELD (it would surprising if they were, as the statistics are all over the place for it and SHIELD wants to keep their good agents closer then enemies to uphold DADT, since they would eliminate a good portion of SHIELD if they did; they were mavericks and certifiable most of the time, so they didn’t exactly follow all the rules, or at least Fury’s branch didn’t) and they learn that she’s completely deaf.

Phil has to physically stand, with Elizabeth in his arms, between Clint and the doctor to get Clint to  _not_  leap at the man when he says something about how their baby girl will never be a productive member of society. A few more tests reveal that even if they got the tubes inserted into her ears, it wouldn’t help, or Phil would be having her signed up for the surgery.

He’s a backwards hick, their doctor (though not really, but Phil is angry and he has to stop Clint from killing the man because it would be hard to explain). They get a new doctor quickly, one that will be more open-minded about their daughter, but Clint watches each person for a week.

Phil holds off on talking to the speech therapist, at least for a little while.

There are miles still to go, but these miles will be easier so long as Clint is there too.

And Clint has no intentions of leaving.


End file.
